1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to Internet based personalized radio/music technology. More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus and method allowing a user to skip one or more songs in a pre-selected play list without having an unintended delay between skips.
2. Description of the Related Art
Internet based personalized radio services, such as Radio@AOL and iSelect, provide users a high flexibility to choose programs and make their own play list using a graphical user interface which is part of the client application of the service. The client application sends a user's request to the server and the server responds to the user's request by returning the requested in compressed data. The client application along with the user's browser executes a decompression algorithm to decompress the compressed data in real time and sequentially plays the data as it is transferred from the server to the user's computer over the Internet. Using streaming technologies, the user's computer does not need to download the entire file first and then play it. Rather, after downloading a minimal section of data into a buffer, the user's computer reads from the buffer and plays the song or music represented by the data. The data already read by the computer is deleted from the buffer so as to ease the RAM requirements and maintain a balance between the write-in and the read-out data flows.
When the user's computer plays a play list or a preset, which is either created by the user or by the service provider, the server sends and the user's computer receives the data over the Internet in a programmed sequence so that there is no unintended delay between any two programs in the list. If the user does not interrupt, the computer plays the songs in the list one by one in an organized consecutive manner. However, when the user switches from one list or preset to another, the users actually interrupts the natural flow of the play list or the preset. In these circumstances, because the computer has to request that the server start to send the data for the target list or preset, several seconds of loading time is needed. Likewise, when the user wants to be actively be involved in the sequence of the play list or preset by skipping one or more songs, as it is illustrated in FIG. 2C, the natural flow of the pre-determined play list or preset is interrupted by the loading transition. This type of unintended delay between skips has been a major factor affecting users experience using personalized radio service.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to provide a solution to overcome the unintended delay or pause problem caused by a user's skipping from one song to the other while a pre-determined list of selections is playing in a programmed sequence.